Since September People’s Voice Media have been working on a new project with volunteers and community members from across the different areas of Manchester.

The project is aimed at using lived experience storytelling to build and enhance meaningful relationships between healthcare professionals, the VCSE sector and communities experiencing health inequalities. There is also a focus on COVID-19 and the vaccination roll out, but the intention is that techniques adopted can be used in different ways in the future. The approach taken will use elements of the Community Reporting methodology to support the activity.

As part of the project, people with existing connections with communities in Manchester experiencing health inequalities have been trained in how to gather lived experience stories around the topic of COVID-19 and the vaccination rollout from their community. They have also taken part in workshops covering how to share these stories – or extracts from them – within their communities to help initiate and hold conversations about health.

Participants who took part in the initial story gathering training went away and gathered 3 stories from individuals in their communities, utilising the digital skills and storytelling practices they had developed to engage with people and start conversations. In the second workshop they learnt about story curation and mobilisation, developing their own plan on how the stories could then be shared within their communities. They are now in the phase of distributing the stories in order to encourage conversations around the topics of health and COVID-19.

The project will run until December 2021, with the final workshop focusing on the key learnings that have emerged from the project and what impact it has had on the communities involved.

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